Ben Carson's Scientific Ignorance

For a man with an impressive educational C.V., Ben Carson makes a lot of intellectual missteps. In his September 16th debate performance, he displayed a profound lack of foreign-policy knowledge; last Sunday, when he said, on “Meet the Press,” that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” he may have seriously crippled his campaign. Still, there’s one area in which Carson’s credentials have seemed unimpeachable. Many people assume that, as a successful surgeon, he has a solid knowledge of technical, medical, and scientific issues.

With the wide release of (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6ChFtIDUbg) that Carson made to his fellow Seventh-Day Adventists in 2012, however, it’s becoming clear that there are significant gaps. In the speech, he made statements on subjects ranging from evolution to the Big Bang that suggest he never learned or chooses to ignore basic, well-tested scientific concepts. In attempting to refute the Big Bang, for example—which he characterized as a “ridiculous” idea—Carson said:

You have all these highfalutin scientists, and they’re saying that there was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now, these are the same scientists who go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization. So, now you’re going to have this big explosion, and everything becomes perfectly organized. When you ask them about it, they say, “Well we can explain this based on probability theory, because if there’s enough big explosions, over a long enough period of time, billions and billions of years, one of them will be the perfect explosion”…. What you’re telling me is, if I blow a hurricane through a junkyard enough times, over billions and billions of years, eventually, after one of those hurricanes, there will be a 747 fully loaded and ready to fly.

He continued, “It’s even more ridiculous than that, because our solar system, not to mention the universe outside of that, is extraordinarily well organized, to the point where we can predict seventy years away when a comet is coming. Now, [for] that type of organization to just come out of an explosion? I mean, you want to talk about fairy tales, that is amazing.” Finally, he argued that the observed motion of the planets in our solar system would be impossible if there had been a Big Bang.

It is hard to find a single detailed claim in his diatribe that is physically sensible or that reflects accurate knowledge about science. His central claim—that the second law of thermodynamics rules out order forming in the universe after the Big Bang_—_is a frequent misstatement made by creationists who want to appear scientifically literate. In reality, it is completely false. Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us. A snowflake is another beautifully ordered example of what simple natural meteorological processes can produce. Stars form by gravity, collapsing into spherically ordered structures that can remain in this form only if they release tremendous heat energy into the environment. Carson elides these physical realities by creating a straw man: he says that scientists believe that, after the Big Bang, the universe was “perfectly ordered.” But no such claim has been made by scientists; instead, we describe how local order, including galaxies, stars, planets, and life, developed over time.

When Carson says that scientists rely on “probability theory” to explain how multiple Big Bangs, taking place over “billions of years,” have resulted in our “perfectly ordered” universe, he’s profoundly misstating the theory of the Big Bang. (In fact, he seems to have gotten his ignorant arguments confused—his metaphor about a hurricane creating a 747 in a junkyard is often used to deride evolution, to which it is equally inapplicable.) No one suggests that other Big Bangs have happened or are happening in our universe. Instead, all evidence implies that our universe originated from a single Big Bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago. Perhaps Carson was referring to the possibility of other universes outside of our universe, and to the so-called anthropic principle, which suggests that, if there are many universes, the fact that our universe supports life could be a probabilistic phenomenon. But those ideas, whether they’re true or not, have nothing to do with the reality of the Big Bang. We conclude the Big Bang happened because every piece of observational evidence we have about the universe is precisely consistent with predictions based on this possibility and none other. Speculations about other possible universes are irrelevant.

Perhaps his silliest statements have to do with our own solar system. Carson claims that our solar system is perfectly ordered—but, in fact, the motion of the planets is chaotic in the long term, and, although we can predict the motion of comets over the seventy-year period he discusses**,** for longer time horizons, such as millions or billions of years, the complexity of our solar system makes that practically impossible. Even more problematically, he points to the fact that some moons orbit in different directions from their planets and argues that those orbits would be impossible if there had been a Big Bang, because angular momentum would forbid it:

You know, you’ve got this mass bending and then it explodes. In physics, we have something we call “angular momentum,” and it is preserved, so it should be preserved in any orbit of anything that is affected by gravity around a planet, which means everything has to traverse in the same direction. Well, it doesn’t! There are many planets that have satellites and moons that go in opposite directions. So that doesn’t work with angular momentum!

This is akin to saying that, if there really had been a Big Bang billions of years ago, skaters today should be able to spin in only one direction. Local systems can exchange angular momentum with their surroundings by collisions, and many forms of chaotic motion are, therefore, possible. Bathwater rotates around the drain, sometimes clockwise and sometimes counterclockwise, happily independent of the Big Bang. The questions that Carson goes on to ask about the “debris” from the Big Bang—“What about all the debris from the billions and billions of explosions that were not perfect? Where’s that? I mean, we should be bombarded constantly by all this debris coming down; we’re not seeing it”—are meaningless if our entire visible universe arose from a single Big Bang, which is what the evidence suggests.

Carson’s wild delusions aren’t confined to physics, either. In the same event, in a more surprising and perhaps more worrisome statement, Carson claimed that evolution, as explained by Darwin, was actually the work of the devil. (“I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary, and it has become what is scientifically, politically correct.”) As if invoking Satan weren’t bad enough, Carson resorted to bad puns to sidestep his scientific ignorance: he went on to say that he was planning a book called “The Organ of Species,” which he said would “talk about the organs of the body and how they completely refute evolution”—an amazing claim that would require a rewriting of most biology texts. At another point in the speech, he uses a long stream of medical terminology to argue against the biochemical origins of life—something he doesn't seem to realize has nothing to do with Darwinian evolution itself. Elsewhere, he claims that plants couldn’t have evolved before bees and that sexual reproduction shouldn’t have evolved at all, and suggests that geological formations provide evidence of a great flood, not an old Earth.

It is one thing to simply assert that you don’t choose to believe the science, in spite of a mountain of data supporting it. It’s another to mask your ignorance in such a disingenuous way, by using pseudo-scientific, emotion-laden arguments and trading on your professional credentials. Surely this quality, which reflects either self-delusion or, worse still, a willingness to intentionally deceive others, is of great concern when someone is vying for control of the nuclear red button.

Last week, when he was confronted, during a speech at Cedarville University, about his failure to understand basic and fundamental scientific concepts, Carson responded, “I’m not going to denigrate you because of your faith, and you shouldn’t denigrate me for mine.” What Carson doesn’t seem to recognize is that there is a fundamental difference between facts and faith. An inability to separate religious beliefs from an assessment of physical reality runs counter to the very basis of our society—the separation of church and state.

By his own admission, Carson’s remarkable hand-eye coördination allowed him to soar as a surgeon, and he used that success to build a lucrative reputation as a purveyor of advice for young and old. His book for young people is titled “You Have a Brain.” As numerous religious scientists have quipped, God wouldn’t have given us a brain if he hadn’t intended for us to use it. While many may debate whether his lack of public-service experience disqualifies him from serious consideration in this race, Carson’s ideas about religion, science, and public office, as revealed in the past week, suggest that there are far deeper reasons to be concerned about his candidacy for the highest office in the land.

Lawrence M. Krauss is the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is chair of the board of sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and is on the board of the Federation of American Scientists.